partly-formed thoughts on a difficult torah passage

[cellio]

This week's torah study largely revolved around one verse from Va'etchanan, Deut 7:2: "When God your Lord places [the seven nations in the land] at your disposal and you defeat them, you must utterly destroy them, not making any treaty with them or giving them any consideration." (Translation from ORT.)

(There are, of course, other places where this subject comes up too; the book of D'varim is largely repetition. This is where our study group is now.)

This directive makes many people (myself included) uncomfortable. How can God command us to utterly destroy people, when elsewhere in torah we're given strong ethical directives about how we treat others, including non-Jews? This doesn't sound like treating your fellow as yourself or dealing kindly with the strangers in your midst. As with many things in torah, I think it depends on how you read it.

The thing I noticed immediately, when someone brought up the ethical laws, is that those laws talk about treating individuals but, perhaps, the current verse talks about treating peoples. The torah goes on to forbid intermarriage with these peoples, specifically because those nations will lure the Israelites into idolatry. It's not an idle fear, as the story of Pinchas illustrates.

I'm not comfortable reading "utterly destroy" literally. My instinct is to try to narrow the context to "in the land of Israel" -- that is, it might be fine with God if the Hittites et al go do their thing somewhere else, but the Israelites have to destroy their influence within Israel. It's tied to the conquest of the land, after all, so maybe "utterly destroy" means "destroy them as an organized presence in this land". The previous verse (which I didn't quote) says that God will drive these seven nations out; maybe we can read the present verse as closer to "and keep it that way". Israel is not being commanded to go out into the world, seek out every last Hittite, and kill him. That status seems to be reserved for Amalek.

My Hebrew probably isn't good enough for this analysis, but here I go. The phrase translated as "utterly destroy" is "hachareim tacharim", which repeats the same root in two different forms. (It's a chet, not a chaf; I really need to learn the right way to distinguish them in ASCII transliteration.) Repetition sometimes means emphasis; if that's what's going on here and if we take "destroy" at face value, then you could informally translate the phrase as "really, I mean it, destroy them", which to this English speaker is not quite the same as "utterly destroy them". (Granted, English is not the original language and all translations are imperfect.) By contrast, when God commands Israel to "obliterate" the memory of Amalek (Deut 25:19), which is quite definitely a call to more direct action, the verb used is "timcheh" (not the same root as the present case).

The difference in word choice piqued my curiosity, so off to BDB (the lexicon of choice for this, I'm told) I went. Chet-reish-mem (which you might recognize as "cherem", excommunication) seems to be closer to "prohibit", while mem-chet-hei is closer to "strike". So perhaps my instinct was right, that the text is telling us to take different kinds of actions in the two cases (seven nations versus Amalek). Ch-R-M doesn't imply a lack of violence, but the degrees might be different.

When encountering difficult passages, some Jews (especially liberal ones) fall back on the view that this was a text written for an earlier people and it needs to speak in their cultural context (and, hand-wave, this speaks to them and not to us). If you're going to take that approach, though, then why seriously study any of it? At best you can pick and choose the parts that still give warm fuzzy feelings millennia later. Whether you think the torah was written by God (for all time) or men, if you think it's important at all then I think you need to wrestle with all of it, not just the appealing parts. This is one of the reasons I'm so pleased with the (slow) speed of our torah-study group; we're not doing the weekly parsha but rather just a few verses at a time, in sequence. If you try to do several chapters in an hour, of necessity you're going to skip parts entirely.

I don't claim to be good at this wrestling; I could be (and often am) off base in how I read the text. This is why I ask questions and raise challenges in torah study and classes, make posts like this, and engage my fellow congregants in discussions when they seem willing. I hope to learn from the process, both in articulating what I think I understand and in hearing others' views. How else can I tease out a better understanding?

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Hebrew has a relatively wide variety of H-like phonemes. Chet is an unvoiced uvular trill, which is symbolized in the International Phonetic Alphabet by a lower-case Greek chi. Chaf is an unvoiced pharyngeal fricative; in IPA that's a lower-case h with a crossbar through the descender. So you might use an X and a (modified) h.

In Kirshenbaum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirshenbaum), an ASCII realization of IPA, they are r" and H respectively. But you'd probably have to specify that you're using Kirshenbaum.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

I meant a crossbar through the ascender.